by Gwen Florio
“This is Khurshid. She will help you with things.”
Khurshid was already pouring tea. Good smells wafted from the alcove. Khurshid spread an oilcloth on the floor. She ducked into the alcove and came back with plates heaped high with sabzi challow.
“Sit,” Nur Muhammed urged into the strained silence. The girl returned a last time with a bowl of water and a towel, and the family passed it silently, dipping their fingers into the bowl and blotting them on the towel. Bibi fidgeted beside Gul. Finally, she could contain herself no longer. “Is this Khurshid’s house?”
“It is our flat for now. It was her father’s. He is a good friend to Gulbuddin.” He named the leader of one of the factions so busily destroying the city.
“Where is her father now? Why does he not live here? Where are her brothers and sisters?” Bibi was Nur Muhammed’s favorite and thus able to get away with the sort of rude interrogation that would have earned Gul a rebuke, or worse.
“He has difficulties.” Gul knew then that those difficulties were financial. “I helped him by renting this flat. And—” He said something then to the girl in Dari too rapid for Gul to follow. She blushed and smiled.
“How long will we live here? When will we go home?”
“As long as it takes me to conduct my business here. Finish your dinner.”
They ate the rest of the meal in silence. The mutton in the challow was of a quality that had not been available in Jalalabad for some time, rich and fatty, and Gul rolled it around in his mouth, savoring the way it filmed his tongue with meaty flavor. Khurshid had also prepared aushak, Gul’s favorite, and when she noticed how he enjoyed the dumplings of pungent green onions, wrapped in tissue-thin dough, slick with meat sauce and yogurt, she slipped an extra one onto his plate.
“Too much mint.” Maryam pushed hers aside. But Gul stuffed handfuls into his mouth until Bibi made fun of the sheen coating his lips. Khurshid did not eat but sat unspeaking behind Nur Muhammed. When he had finished, she moved about the room, retrieving the plates and carrying them onto the balcony. Gul heard water splashing as she washed them.
The silence in the room thickened. Even Gul’s rambunctious brothers had stilled. Gul eased a hand up to scratch his face and peered through a screen of fingers at his father, seemingly engrossed in studying the carpet’s geometric pattern, and then at his mother, her eyes narrowed and jaw set.
“Well?” she asked.
“She will help you.” Nur Muhammed did not look up from the carpet, whose garnet fibers bespoke its origins in Mazar-i-Sharif.
“Then she is a servant.”
“Enough!” Nur Muhammed stood and crossed the small room, leaning low over Maryam, putting his face next to hers. “She is my wife.”
The sharp intake of breath Gul heard was his own. For one more moment, Maryam sat stonelike, staring at her husband. In the next, she simply collapsed into herself. The sounds from the balcony stopped.
“Bibi, take care of your mother. Bring her some water.”
As if on cue, Khurshid stepped back into the room and handed Bibi a full cup. Bibi took the cup, holding it in her fingertips as if it were dirty, then flung it into Khurshid’s face. The girl gasped, and began to sob. Nur Muhammed grabbed Bibi’s arm and spun her around, slapping her so hard that she reeled backward, crying out as she stumbled over her mother’s prone form. On the floor, Maryam stirred, opened her eyes, and saw Khurshid dripping above her and Bibi keening beside her. She sat up and howled toward the ceiling. Gul was sure it could be heard halfway across Kabul.
Caution and laughter warred briefly within him. Looking at Nur Muhammed’s face, he let the former win. Nur Muhammed stood silent within the din, letting all of them see the disgust on his face. Maryam wailed louder.
Nur Muhammed turned his back on her. “Come!” Khurshid stumbled toward him, the tears running unchecked down her face. He led her through a curtain that screened another room. Before he let the curtain fall, Gul glimpsed sleeping mats on the floor. His mother beat her breast and tore at her clothes. The little children, frightened by the commotion, crept sniveling to Gul’s side. He wanted to put his hands to his ears but was mindful of what remained of his dignity as the oldest. So he sat, waiting for the storm to subside, unable to prevent himself from hearing, in the pauses when Maryam caught her breath, the noises coming from the other room, more ostentatious than those he had ever heard in their home in Jalalabad: soft rustling sounds, quickening harsh breaths and then, from Nur Muhammed, a long, deep groan, followed after a pause by a low chuckle that was his father’s declaration of triumph and, therefore, satisfaction.
Twelve
PHILADELPHIA, DECEMBER 2001
The heavy metal can rocked in Liv’s hand. Gasoline splashed onto her fingers and sluiced across the generator, some going into the generator’s tank, but far too much onto the parking lot’s macadam. The scent, sharp and accusing, rose in the icy air.
The instructor sucked in her breath. “You’ll need to do better than that. Gas is too precious to waste.”
Liv set the can on the ground and waved her hand, trying to dry it. She didn’t want to wipe it on her clothes, and the instructor—Kirstie Davidson, entirely too cheerful a name for the humorless martinet assigned to prepare her for every aspect of life in Afghanistan—offered neither suggestions nor a towel.
Wind whipped around the corner of the featureless office building where her training took place. A bland sign proclaimed Security Systems Inc. Mall cops, Liv might have thought, had she ever noticed it among the hundreds of low-slung office parks necklacing Philadelphia. But many of the instructors were former Special Ops types who’d found it far more lucrative—not to mention safer—to train aid workers and journalists on their way to what they euphemistically called “conflict zones.”
Liv glared at the recalcitrant generator. Not for the first time, she resented the fact that Martin had gone ahead of her to Pakistan for his own, more detailed, orientation. She’d meet him in Islamabad in February, and together they’d spend more time acclimating before finally settling in Kabul. By which time, she hoped, it would be spring.
A plastic shopping bag wrapped itself around her ankle. She kicked it away. The generator exercise would take only a few minutes, but had to be done outdoors, beneath the low and angry sky. Liv shivered, despite having shrugged into her parka on the way out. Davidson, her light trench coat flapping unbuttoned, appeared damnably unaffected.
“Again.”
Liv hefted the can, steadied it with a hand against the bottom, and successfully directed a gurgling stream into the tank. She set the can aside, screwed the top back on the tank, and reached for the switch.
“Wait!”
Liv figured every single person within a fifty-yard radius stopped whatever they were doing at the sound of Davidson’s bark.
“Have you checked the oil level?”
Gasoline fumes bent and distorted the air above the boxy metal contraption before them. The letters spelling out OIL wavered. Liv extracted the tiny dipstick and extended it for Davidson’s approval, the viscous coating of oil appropriately between the “add” and “full” lines.
She replaced it. Her fingers, already turning blue, hovered over the switch. She wished she’d worn gloves.
“Wait!”
Liv mentally ran through the steps in the instruction manual she’d studied the night before. They’d seemed so clear.
“Air filter.” Davidson heaved up an immense sigh.
Liv wiggled it from its compartment. It looked clean.
“They won’t look like that in Afghanistan,” Davidson warned. “The air is full of crap there. You’ll need to replace them at twice, three times the recommended rate. Don’t forget. Oh, and this nice shiny machine you’re dealing with here? Things get beat up fast there. You won’t see these pretty little labels, everything obvious. You should be able to start this thing in the dark. Even though . . . what?”
Liv knew this one.
“I wi
ll never take my headlamp off. Not even in the daytime.”
“Because?”
“Because the sun goes down fast. Because you never know where you might be. Because plans change, and change again,” she chanted. “You might think you’re going to spend all day in the office, and then you have to go out for fieldwork, and if you’re out there when the sun goes down—”
Davidson held up her hand. “Fine, fine. Just loop it around your neck during the day. After a while, you’ll forget it’s there. And what else?”
Liv knew this one, too. “And even if you’ve got your headlamp, don’t ever get caught outside when the sun goes down.” She bit her lip. No use repeating all of the things that could happen to anyone who did.
“Yeah. Think of that headlamp as a talisman. If you’ve got it on, nothing will happen.”
Talisman? Such a whimsical idea from the no-nonsense Davidson. A wriggle of trepidation, persistent no matter how many times she squelched it, reasserted itself. But the whole idea of orientation was to allay such concerns. To be prepared for every eventuality and worst possible outcome. Hence, the growing stack of files on Liv’s computer, labeled “land mines,” “booby traps,” “kidnapping,” “disease.”
At night, she drifted off to a panoply of dire images. Three rocks, splashed with red paint. Or three twists of dried grass. Three crossed sticks—all symbols that indicated a minefield. Davidson, for once not shouting: “Here, we usually think of three as a lucky number. In Afghanistan it is, too. Three can save your life.”
Not everything carried a warning sign. A gleaming wire, thin as a hair, that led to an explosive. A door left invitingly ajar. Push it open, and trigger a bomb. And then? More instructions. Plastic to seal a sucking chest wound. (“Always carry baggies. Handy to hold toilet paper and wet wipes—you’ll always want to carry some—and for first aid, too.”) Never pull out a piece of shrapnel embedded in flesh. Never push intestines back in.
She’d vaguely titled her largest file “daily life.” That’s where the generator came in. And more.
“Are you on the pill?” Davidson demanded early on.
Liv, too startled for speech, shook her head.
“Then go on it.”
“But . . .” Early in their marriage, when Martin’s work had taken him to the refugee camps in Pakistan, and he’d assumed there’d be more of the same, he’d persuaded Liv that a family would complicate such a lifestyle, a career. A vasectomy followed. Oh, how she’d wanted to please him then. Something that, apparently, hadn’t changed.
“Either that,” Davidson said, her voice characteristically too loud, “or bring two years’ worth of tampons with you. Because you won’t find them in Afghanistan.”
“I don’t understand.” Liv glanced around. They’d been walking through an office at the time, the cubicles largely populated by men, all suddenly bent over their work with reddened ears. Liv knew exactly how they felt.
“Take a regular pill every day of the month. Skip the week’s worth of dummy pills. That way you won’t get your period. Trust me, it’s easier.”
Liv revised her initial impression of Davidson’s age downward. What was the woman’s story?
“Were you in the military?” she’d asked once, only to be answered with a terse no.
Now Davidson pointed to the generator. “Okay.”
Liv flipped the switch to On and the generator came to life, a chugging, stinking precursor to her new existence.
* * *
Day by day, the training changed her view of the world.
That car, idling in front of the student union. She gave it a wide berth. The clump of trash, overflowing its container. What might it conceal? A too-wide smile from a passing youth. She hurried to put distance between them. And, all around, the professors, staff, students, oblivious of the dangers the universe was capable of holding. Situations, she reminded herself, she now knew how to deal with.
In a parking lot, two students fumbled to connect jumper cables to their car batteries.
“Let me.” Liv approached, took the cables without waiting for an answer, and clipped positive to positive, negative to negative, the second negative to a strut. She resisted an impulse to dust off her hands—too dramatic—and waved away their stammering thanks. That very morning, she’d learned to fasten tiny alligator clips to her own car’s battery to power a laptop. The generator now purred to life in response to her ministrations.
Likewise, she’d become accustomed to the surprising heft of a Beretta M9, the metal warming in her hand. The kick when she pulled the trigger, learning to steady herself against it. “Under no circumstances will you carry one of these. Ever.” Davidson’s voice lowered, denoting an intensity unusual even for her. “This is a little popgun compared to what will be all around you. But it’s a necessary skill. Because God forbid you should ever find yourself in the sort of situation where you have to grab one, use it. Sort of like always having a headlamp.” Liv braced herself, steadied her breathing, squeezed. A hole opened in the chest of the paper target.
“Good.” A first from Davidson. Liv didn’t insult her by smiling.
In all her years at the university, Liv’s skills had amounted to click-clacking away at a keyboard, finding things in the ether, her hard-won discoveries printed out and handed over to others. Now she knew how to do things. For herself. She touched a hand to her pocket, where a sheaf of baggies slipped and slid against one another. Because you never knew. She’d save the headlamp for Afghanistan. But it was ready, nestled within her purse, its hard practicality bumping up against the frivolity of lip gloss, a little-used compact.
Her fellow researchers at the library daily peppered her with questions. Aren’t you scared? Can’t you just stay here?
No and no. Delivered with a briskness meant to imply “of course not.” And, increasingly truthfully, despite these ominous training sessions, “I wouldn’t want to.”
Liv, long accustomed to life in the background shadows, at first had shied away from the sudden spotlight. But its glare came from professors, too, even administrators. “I would never. You’re so brave.”
She found herself preening, a sensation as satisfying as it was unfamiliar. Never in her life had she been called brave. Never had there been a reason. Her work at the library now mocked her with its frivolity.
“What’s my topic?” A student hovered at the counter, repeating the question she’d snapped at him in her best Kirstie Davidson imitation. The student took a step back. “Could damage from the bubonic plague have been diminished?”
Who cares? A little late for the hundred fifty million victims, no? Why not work on something that could actually help people suffering now? As she herself would be doing in a few short weeks.
Liv had resisted such responses. So far. “Give me your email address. I’ll send you some sources. You’ll have to take it from there yourself.”
She looked at her calendar with its inked countdown of days left to departure. Only a week now until she was free of the students and their meaningless requests for help with papers that would be moldering in a landfill within weeks of being turned in. She was sick of their thanklessness, ready for real life and maybe a little goddamn gratitude, too. She smiled inwardly. Maybe this new self was the kind of person who’d curse aloud.
Movement at the edge of her vision. Another student. Another goddamn student.
“Excuse me? I have a paper due and I wonder if you can help me?”
Liv pulled her head out of Afghanistan and tried to focus on this latest annoyance.
Recognition flashed across the girl’s face. “Mrs. Stoellner?”
Mandy. She looked different in the winter, small inside her puffy coat, face pale, lips chapped. She hefted a book bag onto the library’s long counter. “I had your husband for one of my history classes?”
I had your husband. Unfortunate phrasing, that.
Liv swung in her chair to face the girl. Stood to take advantage of the height she usually con
sidered ungainly. “So that’s not the class you need help with. Unless you’re turning in your paper late again.”
Mandy’s brow creased, then smoothed. “Oh. You’re being funny again? How is Professor Stoellner?”
“He’s seven thousand miles away.” An impossible distance that suddenly seemed just right.
“I never got to congratulate him. I tried to email him but it got bounced back? Could you give me his new email address?”
“I don’t think they have email set up at his new office yet,” Liv lied. “But I’ll be happy to tell him for you.” Like hell I would.
Mandy chewed her flaking lips. Her pale eyes watered. “That won’t be necessary.”
Liv folded her arms across her chest and waited. “Your paper?”
Mandy dragged the book bag back across the counter. “Never mind. I’ll do it myself.”
She trudged away. Liv wondered what the attraction had been. She tried to imagine Mandy fumbling with the generator. Or at the gun range, her arm drooping with the weight of the sidearm. Someone like Mandy would miss the signs denoting a land mine, would almost certainly push open the door that led to the booby trap. Would forget the headlamp.
